Review: Slackel 7.7 "Openbox"
There are some things the Slackel project handles quite well and which made the distribution fun to explore. The Openbox environment has a nice, classic layout; the distribution ships with a lot of useful desktop applications; and I like that Flatpak is set up for us in case we want to use it. I also appreciated how up front the project was with its documentation and access to scripts which make it easier to transfer the distribution to a thumb drive and enable persistence.
On the other hand, I regularly ran into problems (most of them small, a few of them significant) which hint at the project not getting enough testing or not being used by a wide enough audience. Having three completely different boot experiences whether I was using VirtualBox or my laptop, and whether I was using UEFI or Legacy BIOS modes, was a key example. The script for transferring the distribution to a thumb drive failing because the author assumes sh links to bash is another as this isn't true on the majority of the world's Linux installations.
Having my sound card not detected by Slackel while it works on virtually every other Linux distribution was disappointing. A smaller issue was finding three separate utilities which could be used to adjust fonts on the system, but none of them affected the font used by the application menu or desktop applications. Playing audio and changing font sizes/styles feel like pretty standard features of desktop distributions these days.
In short, Slackel does a few things really well, but it also tripped over simple tasks a lot during my trial. I felt like the overall design was good, the style of the project felt as though it could be quite useful, especially for people who want to take their operating system with them in a portable fashion. However, there were several areas which lacked polish, didn't work for me, or which could benefit from broader testing (across more environments and equipment).